NASA's Conundrum: Cut Costs Without Layoffs

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NASA's Conundrum: Cut Costs Without Layoffs

Technicians at Kennedy Space Center are completing installation of the reinforced carbon-carbon panels onto Atlantis for her upcoming Oct 8th Hubble repair mission. For many of them the question is, "what do I do after the last Shuttle has flown?"

For NASA the question is even more complicated. The agency has been told by Congress that its programs cost too much and that if it wants to continue human space flight it needs to make it more affordable. Then when NASA proposes spaceships that will not cost as much to maintain and fly, it is criticized for turning thousands of people out of work and onto the street.

It's a hard one to win.

The Shuttle is a very precise, labor-intensive craft. It takes 50,000 labor hours, thousands of workers and a few months to turn it around between flights. There are 15,000 contractors and 1,700 NASA civil servants supporting the Space Shuttle program. For those looking to build a robust US space effort, both commercial and civil, it's essential to build spacecraft that require less time and lower costs for each launch. So when NASA finds a way to launch humans into space using needs a few thousand fewer people on the ground, it should get a pat on the back. Instead, it gets a congressional hearing.

At least NASA had some good news at last month's hearing. Of the 6,000-7,000 jobs that were expected to be lost after the Space Shuttle retires in 2010, some 3,000-4,000 of them can be transitioned to new jobs supporting the Ares V rocket and Altair lunar lander. Neither program was included in the original job transition estimate.

Beyond the jobs is the issue of brain drain. Because there will be an extended gap between Shuttle and Constellation, many people will depart from NASA. Some of these people are not the folks we want to lose. As articulated at scienceprogress.org:

These NASA and aerospace workers employ critical skills and engineering know-how vital to keeping the U.S. competitive and at the forefront of cutting-edge technology and innovation. Their expertise is employed in a broad range of high-tech fields, including: robotics, solar energy, life support system research, remote sensing (including environmental applications), ion propulsion, hypersonic flight, composite heat shielding, nano and computer technologies, and biomedical applications.

So it's a very fine line between efficiency and losing science and engineering know-how.

Still, if you want a cheaper spaceflight program, you need fewer people working on it. If you want to protect each job, you either need to keep things expensive by artificially retaining jobs, (this can lead to a glut of under-tasked people) or you create new tasks for them to do. NASA is expecting to host the same number of jobs post-shuttle and pre-shuttle. However for people who are trained to be shuttle technicians in Florida, it may not work to have them support an ultraviolet telescope mission in Maryland (besides, moving them to Maryland doesn't help the economy in Florida's Brevard County either).

Maybe we will just add this to the long, hard-to-fulfill wish list of the US Government– alongside coal that doesn't release CO2, less traffic and lower gas prices.